Can you get banned for this?

[Poopstainedmattress]

If I were to buy platinum from a different site that offers cheaper platinum prices and initiate a trade with the person I'm buying from, could my account be banned?

[Xiusa]

Yes

[Mama_Sasha]

Yes, because 100% of the time of such sites, that money never goes to DE, and in worst cases, the said platinum you ''buy'' from there, could have been aquired via hacking from the said seller, or perhaps stolen via scamming.

Never buy platinum from anywhere other than from DE's officual website.

Edited August 21, 2017 by Sasha_The_Lynx

[ashrah]

garanted ban.. just dont

[Carnage2K4]

Yeah, you don't want a probably dodgy account being linked to yours in any way, if they go down in future, you might go down with them for supporting them, not worth the risk.

[FairyTael]

If you have to ask if it is "legal"/"safe"/"acceptable" to do something, chances are that it probably isn't.

[(PSN)Dark-TailedFox]

That's what you call gold selling dude. It's bannable across all games and fuels even more illegitimate schemes the more they're paid (like WoW bots and Dofus bots that spam websites for "cheap priced premium currency")

[TrashSpider]

Yup, and also sounds like a short way to get yourself scammed. 

[EGDestro]

yes because on 99 % of the case the plat is purchased with a stolen card so I would advice wait until you get a 75 % code and get 10 bucks deal that should cover you for a long time if you spend plat on slots and a few accessories.

[IggySnow]

Yes you can get banned. but depending on who you buy it from chances are you wont.

BUT if for example if you get scammed, like the guy takes your money and doesn't give you any plat, DE cant and will not do anything about it. since what you are doing is against DEs terms of service.

[xXx_mtv_xXx]

Those are just phising sites that want to steal your money and/or game account.

[KIREEK]

It's not cheaper on the long run, you see by buying it, it will eventually be removed from your account, if you get a negative balance it's a ban and the ban will remain for as long you have the negative plat, since you can't login you can't get platinum discounts, meaning to recover your account you will need to buy platinum at full price.

This means you not only pay to the platinum seller, you also pay full price for the platinum so you can play with your account, most of the platinum is just to break even, so if you have -1600 platinum and you buy 2000 platinum, you end up with 400 platinum in your account.

Do you understand what this means, you buy 400 platinum at the cost of 2000 without discounts, you also get a 2 month trade ban and you will likely be watched more carefully by support.

The thing you want is to get that platinum and not getting caught, sadly this is pretty much impossible, platinum sellers use several ways to sell platinum and they all become logged.

They can:

 - login into your account (an infraction right there + potential to steal your account) and buy the platinum themselves, a small profit is made here, however the suddent ip change, machine id change, it is likely that these things are logged, meaning in the future they can see all related buyers and sellers.

 - send you the platinum, legit platinum or not if it's found to be platinum in these kinds of deals, the plat is removed, even if you think you're in the clear, platinum sellers sell platinum not just once, but several times, they are bound to get caught due to the high volume of plat traded, once he is found, all transactions are checked, you're screwed at this point

What they often seek is legit accounts, because an account from another user (that doesn't have 2 step verification) is an excelent hideout for them, as they can trade valuable mods and platinum to their main account or sell the platinum to other users, the account is usually clean so they benefit from this "good behavior" instead of using their main accounts which are probably flagged anyway.

The problem here is when the actual owner returns to the game, they ask support as to why the account received such changes since he last visited the account years ago and support will likely reply that he traded high volume of mods/plat to X user, this automatically identifies the plat seller.

If you buy from a platinum seller, you will likely receive something like this in the future (remember that these issues are actually quite common, players banned often refrain from shaming themselves even on such forums, platinum sellers will either dismiss this, blame you or even say that "you knew it wasn't allowed")

Edited August 23, 2017 by KIREEK

[Lanadra]

46 minutes ago, KIREEK said:

Well, damn, take this to heart, OP, you do not want to end up in a situation, whether by accident or by intentionally obtaining platinum via illegal means, where you have to pay DE back easily a hundred *currency* worth of platinum, just to play again.

Plat is expensive enough as it is. It's not ever worth taking a risk. If you want cheap platinum, wait until you get a discount through the login. There's plenty of us (that don't do PA) that exclusively buy platinum when we get a 50/75% off coupon.

[(XBOX)Veytok]

1 hour ago, Artorius-Alter said:

Well, damn, take this to heart, OP, you do not want to end up in a situation, whether by accident or by intentionally obtaining platinum via illegal means, where you have to pay DE back easily a hundred *currency* worth of platinum, just to play again.

Plat is expensive enough as it is. It's not ever worth taking a risk. If you want cheap platinum, wait until you get a discount through the login. There's plenty of us (that don't do PA) that exclusively buy platinum when we get a 50/75% off coupon.

The bigger offense is that he said "an hacker" 

Edited August 22, 2017 by (XB1)JuicdBustnJuugs

[Miser_able]

If you have to ask that, the answer is probably yes. 

[-QUILL_PETER-]

2 minutes ago, Bravely_Casual said:

The biggest offense is that he would have to pay approximately $170 in order to get back to playing this "free to play" game. The 2 month trade ban is just adding insult to injury.

What's your problem with someone being punished for purchasing illegally obtained goods? Heaven forbid anyone should have to actually deal with consequences of their poor judgment, which I reckon a certain sexual misconduct themed forum user may soon face.

[Tesseract7777]

Just now, Rhape said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

That's now how arguing works lol...

Stealing is stealing -- someone's digital property that they worked hard to build is not worth less than something physically built -- you don't even understand what a false equivalence is, that is very clear to me.

 

People are literally using their credit cards to buy, then using chargebacks so they don't have to pay DE anything. Before DE catches the chargeback and removes the plat, they are selling it to others for real money. These people and anyone who buys from them know how this works, and are knowingly engaging in theft. Theft is wrong. It's not rocket science, nor is it a false equivalence. Taking something that isn't yours is just as wrong whether it is physical or digital. 

[FairyTael]

18 minutes ago, Rhape said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

If only your grasp of the English language allowed you to understand the things you link....

That doesn't even come close to applying and if you were smarter, you'd know that.

Here, let me word it in a way you may understand more easily.

Credit Debt is an entirely digital form of legal currency accepted by nearly every business across the US, as it is backed by 'real' dollars through a payback method. If I was to fraudulently use loopholes to create new credit card numbers within say...Visa's database, then use said "fake" credit card numbers to buy say...digital movies, subscriptions to websites, and other digital material, it wouldn't suddenly be less illegal or less of a theft. I could easily go to prison for fraud, theft, or both. Some states even dictate that any theft with a value greater than $500 is a felony offense.

That is what plat sellers do, they generate currency through loopholes and theft and then resell it for additional real money profit. People that participate with this type of blatant abuse deserve any punishment DE dishes out.

Be happy they find themselves content with banning your account until you pay back your stolen charges, you could end up like the thieves in Diablo 3 back in 2012 that the FBI raided and arrested. They were charged with a massive litany of felony offenses and ended up striking a plea bargain to have the charges dropped to misdemeanors.

How much did they steal? The sale of their stolen in-game currency and items netted them just over 8,000 real US dollars.

This is not a joke, this is not a "nothing" offense. Don't be a stupid kid, this can be a big deal.

[TennoPain]

DO NOT DO IT !!!

[Lanadra]

4 hours ago, Tesseract7777 said:

People who buy multiple times from reseller sites for stuff like platinum know full well what they are doing is wrong. You don't need someone to hold up a sign in front of your face constantly saying "don't murder people", "don't steal from people", etc., it's something you already KNOW. DE can't just shut these websites down, at least not without spending way more money than it is worth. You destroy one another pops up, many are hosted in countries where it's harder to sue. 

But these people knew what they were doing, please don't give them the benefit of the doubt, there is none. 

If you buy in game currency from anything but in game, you should know full well you are ripping off the game designers if you have half a brain. And you should know there is a chance you are getting scammed, and a very high chance the person who sold you the plat got it illegally. 

This is not something people should need a PSA for. And quite frankly there is nothing wrong with what DE is doing. 

Think of it this way, they have lots of reason to believe someone basically straight up stole from them (knowingly bought plat that was bought by someone who used an illegitimate credit card to obtain it, and did it multiple times), most companies would just straight up ban you forever. Instead, DE gives you a chance to get your account back if you are willing to pay back the money you stole from them. 

Perfectly fair. The only people who should find something "not right" about that, are those who support third party plat sites and those who buy from them. And those people are thieves. 

The only time I would agree with mr. Rhape, is when the victim, for example, me, sell an item, be it a rare mod or a prime part, to someone who got their plat illegitimately, such as person in the picture above, and thus receive ''bad plat'' without really knowing anything in that regard. After all, the trade system has no indicator, for obvious reasons, that this particular persons plat is illegitimate, and that plat from a different person is legitimate

But generally I imagine DE would recognize such a situation and handle it with care, I can't imagine wanting to wield a sledgehammer when a scalpel is more appropriate in dealing with people who genuinely didn't know that something was shady.

[Orabell]

5 hours ago, Rhape said:

The biggest offense is that he would have to pay approximately $170 in order to get back to playing this "free to play" game. The 2 month trade ban is just adding insult to injury.

Try something like that in every other game and you'd be perma banned, just saying. DE is pretty generous on this one

[Tesseract7777]

41 minutes ago, Artorius-Alter said:

The only time I would agree with mr. Rhape, is when the victim, for example, me, sell an item, be it a rare mod or a prime part, to someone who got their plat illegitimately, such as person in the picture above, and thus receive ''bad plat'' without really knowing anything in that regard. After all, the trade system has no indicator, for obvious reasons, that this particular persons plat is illegitimate, and that plat from a different person is legitimate

But generally I imagine DE would recognize such a situation and handle it with care, I can't imagine wanting to wield a sledgehammer when a scalpel is more appropriate in dealing with people who genuinely didn't know that something was shady.

Oh I agree with you, and sometimes those people end up temporarily banned if the lost plat when its taken out of the system removes enough to put them in the negative (which hurts honest sellers who keep a low plat balance), but from what I understand, people in the situation you described end up getting their accounts unlocked without having to pay DE, because its generally something they can look at and see whether they think the person involved was dishonest or not. 

For example, note the quoted example someone gives on the other page of someone who contacted support claiming they "don't know what they did wrong", after buying plat a bunch of times from a reseller and getting their account locked. DE was able to see that this person had traded items of clearly no value for large amounts of platinum. Now take the fact DE saw multiple transactions of this type over a fairly short period of time. And then they know the platinum was originally obtained illegally. It doesn't take a genius at DE support to realize that this person was buying bad platinum from a reseller over and over again with real money, and trading garbage mods in game for the platinum itself. 

When an innocent reseller sells something valuable for a price within reason, and gets hit with the negative platinum thing, DE support can go look over their account, and restore them to 0 balance so they can play, because it becomes clear to them you were an innocent party caught up in the thievery and fraud of someone else. Innocent people will be found innocent, guilty people it will be fairly obvious they are guilty. It still sucks to get temp banned when you did nothing wrong, but the best way to avoid this kind of fraud is 1) If the price seems to good with little to no negotiation, be cautious, proceed at your own risk. 2) If you do decide to proceed, especially on any big transaction, or if losing a transaction could put you in the negative, wait a few days to see if someone is going to try to chargeback the platinum with their credit card and pull that nonsense. I know it's not a perfect way to protect yourself and it sucks to wait to spend your platinum, but it will help some to avoid that kind of trouble. 

If you are an experienced enough reseller, another trick is to just keep enough of a stock of platinum around that a few trades won't ever put you in the negative. This is harder to do though, and usually only prolific sellers can keep up  that kind of balance. Like I said, the temp bans for negative plat mostly hurt the casual reseller who makes the mistake of spending his plat immediately instead of waiting for it to clear. Although in a perfect world they wouldn't be afraid to wait to spend the plat... sigh. 

Edited August 23, 2017 by Tesseract7777

[2old4gamez]

On 21/08/2017 at 5:23 AM, FairyTael said:

If you have to ask if it is "legal"/"safe"/"acceptable" to do something, chances are that it probably isn't.

Beat me to it! ^

[Lanadra]

2 hours ago, Tesseract7777 said:

 Like I said, the temp bans for negative plat mostly hurt the casual reseller who makes the mistake of spending his plat immediately instead of waiting for it to clear. Although in a perfect world they wouldn't be afraid to wait to spend the plat... sigh. 

Hah, from personal experience, I never wait in spending plat myself. Because usually when I sell items for plat. I want/need that plat there and then. To buy a new frame or rush one I'm building. But yeah, it can come back to haunt you if you ended up the victim of a shady person.

[aidan890]

Hey All,

Question was answered definitively and quickly, so no need to keep this one going. Do not attempt to purchase Platinum through a third party, it will be a violation of the Terms of Service and I guarantee you will not like the outcome.

Locking this one up,

[DE]Aidan